Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 115-30.
Abstract
Sometime in late May 1882, several thousand bison appeared on the Great Sioux reservation about 100 miles west of the Standing Rock Indian agency (see Fig. O. According to James McLaughlin, the Standing Rock agent, the Indians knew "instinctively" that the buffalo had arrived, even though "it had been many years since the buffalo had sought the hunting-grounds of that part of the reservation." With this "rich store of succulent meat in sight," McLaughlin continued, "it was not possible that the Indians could be held in check." On 10 June, over 600 Standing Rock Lakota and Yanktonais left the agency. Days later, they located the herd and killed 5,000 bison.1
McLaughlin's contention that the Indians knew "instinctively" that the bison had arrived revealed the common tendency of European Americans to represent Indians as primitives, so close to nature as to be almost animal-like. (The Standing Rock Sioux themselves probably attributed their knowledge of the bison's presence to a combination of religious and empirical sources.) With its tone of light-hearted nostalgia, McLaughlin's and other similar accounts of the "last buffalo hunt" also reflected the standard trope of the "vanishing Indian." Like most Americans of the time, McLaughlin saw history as the outworking of inevitable laws of "progress." These laws decreed that the buffalo must disappear and that, when they did, Plains Indians would either die off or be assimilated by a supposedly superior "civilization." In this narrative, the last buffalo hunt decisively marked the end of a way of life. There was little room for continuity between the past and the future.2
This moment, captured in books with titles like The Last Days of the Sioux Nation and The Long Death, continues to inform our understanding of the early reservation period. While many scholars have stressed the persistence of cultural identity, they have given less attention to the continuities in Plains Indians' economic practices during the early reservation period.3 Plains Indians certainly experienced profound and often wrenching changes as Americans forced them onto reservations and began implementing colonial policies. As I argue here, however, there were important and surprising-continuities in their economic strategies.
To understand these strategies it is helpful to remind ourselves that Indians viewed their own circumstances in the early reservation period very differently from non-Indians. Plains Indians did not think the hardships they were suffering were part of an inevitable historical process that necessarily decreed they would have to experience physical or cultural death. Although they were subject to brutal oppression and often experienced demoralization and despair, they thought it was possible to retain their familial, community, and tribal identities and develop new ways to live well under reservation conditions. For Plains Indians, the future was contingent on human action and the willingness of the spiritual powers of the universe to take pity on them. At one level, their economic strategies were practical responses to pressing needs, but they were also informed by the hope that they could "walk the good red road," in the words of Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk.4
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln